Bunker Hill to the Old Pueblo

Walt Disney Concert Hall

Frank Gehry's stainless-steel concert hall, opened in 2003 after sixteen years of planning and a budget battle that nearly killed it.

You are standing in front of Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall, which opened in 2003 after sixteen years of planning, delays, and fundraising that nearly killed the project. The stainless steel curves you see were not the original plan. Gehry wanted stone, but the budget forced a switch to metal, and the first summer after opening, the polished panels reflected so much heat they were scorching pedestrians and raising the temperature inside neighboring condos. Workers had to sand the most troublesome panels to a duller finish.

Lillian Disney, Walt's widow, put up the first fifty million dollars in 1987 after attending a concert at the Hollywood Bowl and deciding Los Angeles deserved a hall as good as the best in Europe. Run your hand over one of the panels near the ground. It is cool to the touch now, but the building still does something few concert halls manage: it makes people stop and stare even when no music is playing.

The Broad

A free contemporary art museum wrapped in a white honeycomb veil of 2,500 concrete panels, opened in 2015.

Across Grand Avenue sits The Broad, a contemporary art museum that opened in 2015 and does something unusual for a Los Angeles cultural institution: it is free. The building, by Diller Scofidio and Renfro, is built around a concept they called 'the veil and the vault.' The white honeycomb shell you see is the veil, a skin of 2,500 fiberglass-reinforced concrete panels that wraps around a gray concrete core, the vault, where the collection's storage and curatorial spaces live. The veil filters daylight into the galleries through a ceiling of 318 skylights. Eli Broad, who made his fortune in homebuilding and insurance, financed the entire 140-million-dollar building himself and insisted on free admission to the permanent collection so that, in his words, anyone could walk in.

The long escalator inside cuts through the vault and delivers you straight into the third-floor galleries. If you have fifteen minutes, step inside even just to ride that escalator and see one or two works. The line moves fast.

Angels Flight

The world's shortest railway, a 298-foot funicular that has been hauling people up and down Bunker Hill since 1901.

You are at the top station of Angels Flight, the shortest railway in the world. It runs 298 feet on a 33 percent grade, and the whole ride takes about fifty seconds. The two cars, named Sinai and Olivet, have been hauling people up and down Bunker Hill since 1901, though not continuously. The city shut the railway down in 1969 as part of a redevelopment plan that razed the entire neighborhood.

The cars sat in a warehouse for 27 years. They came back in 1996, half a block south of the original site, and have been stopping and starting ever since, surviving a fatal crash in 2001, a derailment in 2013, and several rounds of safety overhauls. The fare is a dollar fifty, or fifty cents with a TAP card. Buy a ticket, step into one of the orange and black cars, and ride it down.

The bottom station puts you directly across from the next stop.